


The Nine

by luminescence (epistolic)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 05:00:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/luminescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this beautiful prompt](http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com/14196.html?thread=8887924#t8918644) over on the kinkmeme! Couldn't resist writing about Sansa Stark. I do hope you guys enjoy this ♥

**i.**

She is born in the Summer, but in the black of night: a small grizzled bundle wrapped up against the chill, skin sticky with old blood and one fist clenched, lungs strong, shrill cry like the howl of a beast in the air.

She is the first daughter. They had prayed, of course, for a son. But she is not beautiful yet, and her stormy eyes are as hard and as bright as flint. In the early hours they are worried she will not live; she should not have arrived for a month or so yet; her spine is frail and snappable, her skull looks as if a pinch would cave it in, snuff it out as quick as a candle.

When Robert came, the delivery was as smooth as water. He had gone into the world as simply as if he had always belonged within it.

But she is different: the labour is long, and hard, like a battle.

It is just dawn when Maester Luwin declares the danger past. This one will live. This tiny thing, this runt of a child, with the first rays of light painting her thin hair red as fire: _this one_ , the Maester repeats, with no small wonder in his voice, _this one will live._

 

**ii.**

"You're a murderer," Myra says.

For a moment she does not comprehend. She is being dressed by a maid - slowly, gently, she is running an admiring palm down a row of buttons on her sleeve - the question comes at her like a knife in the dark.

"What?" She looks up into the shock of her face in the mirror.

Myra claps a startled hand over her own mouth. "Oh, my lady, it wasn't _me_ who said it. I don't know how it just slipped out, I just - it isn't true, of course. I'm sorry. I know it isn't true."

"It's alright. I know you couldn't have said it."

"It was the kitchen girls, I swear it. Gossiping. You know how they are. They'll say horrid things about anything and anybody."

"I said already, it's alright."

Her maid has picked up a comb. Her hair is impossibly long, now. In the mirror she can see how it rolls down her shoulders, skittish and jolting whenever she turns her head. Shimmering, inconstant, it has the frustrating habit of changing colour depending on where she finds herself standing. By candlelight, it is a moody brown. In the shade, it is perhaps tinted with a hint of bronze. Only in the sun does it blaze in ringlets down her back; in the sun, even in the wintery sun they get in Winterfell, she is a presence, a beauty on the cusp of maidenhood; she is impossible to look away from.

But now her hair only exasperates her. "No, I don't want it braided. Get me my peridot clasp, will you, Myra? In that drawer there."

She knows what they say about her. There are stories told that her mother, while bearing her, had been pregnant with twins. The Maester himself had said it. And there had been no doubt about the size of her mother's belly.

So, where is that mysterious twin-child? The little lord - for the Maester had been sure it would be a lord - where has he gone?

"Is this it, my lady?" Myra asks.

She takes the clasp from Myra's hand. She thinks about it, weighs it up. In the warm, moist dark of her mother's womb, she imagines the candle-weak flutter of her brother's pulse. She supposes she did kill him; choked him out, sapped him dry. Chewed him up. 

The pulp of his body between her teeth. The mangled wreck of his heart, swallowed down into her ribcage: battered and mashed into place beside her own.

 

**iii.**

When Lady is killed, she feels it in the very marrow of her bones.

She has barricaded herself up in her room. Next door Arya is ranting and raving, stamping up and down the tiles, kicking at chests on the floor. _It isn't fair_ , Arya is shouting. _He's a liar. He's a liar! It isn't fair._ The high-pitched sound of her voice splits the quiet; goes hurtling out into the night, into the walls and forts and rolling plains of Winterfell.

"Shut up," she, Sansa, yells. She stuffs her fingers in her ears.

There is silence for a moment, and then the sound of Arya pounding on her door. "Sansa!"

"Go _away_."

"You're crying loud enough to wake the dead," Arya says, accusing. "Let me in."

She doesn't. She turns her face into the pillow, smothers the hitching breaths and the tears into the silk. She feels crushed. She had been aware of the exact moment when Lady had died: halfway to her room, a stab like a needle into her heart.

There is a pause. Arya's shadow sways in the crack of light beneath her door.

"You shouldn't cry," Arya says, finally. She sounds stubborn. "Crying won't bring Lady back. You shouldn't be sad. You should be _angry_."

She springs up out of bed, fists clenched. "Go away, Arya, or I swear I'll open this door and - "

"What?"

"I'll - I'll rip all your hair out!"

Arya sounds faintly disgusted. "I'm not scared of you. I _hate_ you. You took Joffrey's side. You took the Queen's side, when you knew what had happened - you're just as bad as they are."

"I'm _not_ \- "

But Arya is already gone. Her light footsteps move away; a door, heavy, slams.

She stands for a long while in her room in the dark. She sways. Her hands are still fisted in her dress. She is suddenly tired, exhausted by the day's events and her own grief. Hot tears stream down her cheeks. She decides that she hates Arya, too - hates the way her father's eyes light up whenever he sees her; hates that sharp little face, the quick and roving eyes; hates, above all, Arya's capacity to be utterly unafraid. How does she do it? Spitting and wild, ready to gouge out Prince Joffrey's face with her fingernails right in front of the Queen. Standing her ground on a sinking shore. Even her voice, strong, indisputable: _It isn't fair._

She thinks, why was _I_ not born brave? Why was I not born strong?

She digs her nails hard into the flesh of her palm.

They will burn Lady, she knows. They will take this part of her childhood, this fragment of her heart; they will place it on a pyre, and they will reduce it down to dust.


	2. Chapter 2

**iv.**

They call her _little dove_ , because that is how they see her - a bartering chip, a little harmless thing. Soft-feathered, tame. She is not tame, but she has learned to keep her face turned down; she knows that if she were to look into Cersei's eyes, Cersei would know.

Every day for her now is a battle in containment. Every day, traps are laid out at her feet.

At supper, Cersei eyes her shrewdly from the head of the table. "Sansa, you look pale."

"She's been crying again," Joffrey says. It comes out half annoyed, half amused; his hand makes a little movement on the table, as if he's tempted to reach across and slap her. "She's always crying. One might almost think she didn't want to be here. Do you not want to be here, my lady?"

"I want only to do my lord's bidding," she says.

"And what does that mean?"

"It means that if my lord were to wish me gone, I would go. And if my lord were to wish me to stay, I would stay."

"Then I want you to stay."

She bows her head, obedient.

This frustrates him. She has skirted another of his obstacles - skimmed over it as easily as if it were a hole in the road, and she with wings.

"Your sister," Joffrey says at last. "The ratty one. Reports have come in that she is dead."

It takes every ounce of her being to remain expressionless. She stays sitting, demure, eyes lowered, hands clasped gently before her on the tablecloth as if she were praying. She feels, rather than hears, herself saying: "Was it by your will, my lord?"

"It was."

"And are you glad of it?"

Joffrey makes an incredulous noise. "What do you think? She's a traitor's daughter, like you."

"Then I am glad of it too," she says.

She is aware vaguely of an arch look in Cersei's green eyes. She wants, on a fleeting and dangerous impulse, to meet Cersei's gaze: to show her in no uncertain terms what she is feeling. But some things must be kept in reserve. Some truths, she understands, must stay concealed until the moment comes to strike. Her father did not recognise this - or perhaps did not want to.

"Are you not going to eat, little dove?" Cersei asks her, smiling.

She is not her father. She is not Arya, either: fury without temperance, blow landing before the thought.

"If it please you," she says. She reaches out for the bread.

 

**v.**

"Lady Stark," Tyrion Lannister says, admiring, to her retreating back; "You may survive us yet."

Her steps are unfaltering, steady, as if she hasn't heard. It is not for him to see into her heart. Survival is simple and unambitious; she, Sansa Stark, seeks to _outlive_.

 

**vi.**

Margaery Tyrell is a beauty at seventeen. Those wide, brown eyes; that slender fox-face; that irresistible, lovely, endearing quirk of her mouth.

She, Sansa, on the edge of the chessboard now, is free to observe. Cersei goes about in gowns like armour, bristling with metal plate and jewels and heavy fabrics - you hear her coming from a mile away. You hear the loud brass ring of her voice. You scent her fury on the air preceding her, like a dark perfume. But Margaery is whisper-soft, bare to the arms as if to say, this is my flesh, and I am mortal, the same as you; pay no attention to me, for I am just a woman.

"Do you love him?" she asks her one day without thinking.

Margaery looks at her, distracted. "Sorry, who?"

"The King," she clarifies. She is embarrassed. "Your betrothed."

They are in a courtyard of the palace. The sun is strong today, paring aside the clouds like apple peel. Margaery reaches out, tangles a pale hand into the foliage of a hedge of roses running beside the path; she doesn't pick out a flower. Just runs her hand through the leaves with a soft hum in her throat.

"These roses," Margaery says after a moment. "Once in Highgarden, when I was just a girl, a courtier from the South sent me an entire shipment of these. Pinks, reds, the deepest purples. Blues, too, of the kind you can only get here in King's Landing. I have no idea how he kept them fresh during the journey. It must've been a five-day trip for him on the sea."

"Was he seeking your hand?"

"Oh, no." Margaery laughs, light as the air. "Actually, they were poisoned. One of my maids pricked her finger on a thorn. She was dead within the hour."

She, Sansa, does not know what to say to this.

"Of course, we caught him. It took us some time to persuade him to give up the names of those he worked for, but my brothers can be very persuasive, when they put their minds to it."

A hot branding iron. A screw, turned tight against flesh, and then slowly into it. "He was - you mean, you were - "

Margaery takes her hand. She tugs her, playful, so that she stumbles forward a step. 

"Come, Sansa, it is hot. We should have something to drink."

Margaery Tyrell, seventeen, her brown curls falling soft about her face. If you do not look closely, you will think she is made of silk, as nebulous as a sweet fragrance on the wind; but she isn't. It is a poor show to display yourself in armour. It is unwise, to present yourself as an obvious threat. Better to put your roots out in the dark; to strangle your enemies, above or below ground, as gently and as sweetly as a lover.

**Author's Note:**

> More coming soon! This is my first venture into the Game of Thrones fandom, I do hope it's okay.
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on this and any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
